The developers of a right-wing “election integrity” app managed to expose serious allegations of planned election interference—though by total accident, and coming from their own side.
On election day, Wired reported on flaws in the VoteAlert app developed by True the Vote, a Texas-based election-denial nonprofit involved in conservative efforts to purge voter rolls. According to Wired, anyone could navigate to VoteAlert’s website and view the email addresses of individuals who had submitted reports or comments to the app just by scanning the site’s publicly viewable source code.
A spokesperson for the site told Wired a weekend update to introduce infinite scroll had “temporarily” caused configuration errors—although according to Wired, the data had been exposed for weeks. During that time, only 146 users attributable to separate email addresses were active, although Wired wrote that the group submitted and commented on nearly 200 reports of fraud.
One user claiming to be a California-based county election official detailed a “racist and illegal scheme,” Wired reported, to demand IDs from voters based on arbitrary assumptions of non-citizenship status. California State law does not require voter ID, and Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law banning local governments in the state from requiring them.
“I’m probably going to be fired for this but I was hired by the Riverside County Registrar of Voters as an Election Officer in Hemet, CA,” that user wrote. “Since I’m in charge at this polling center, I’m asking for citizenship ID of anyone that looks suspiciously like they’re not here legally.”
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Wired identified the user via their email address, but did not share their legal name. True the Vote appears to have fixed the bug, although no one at the organization would go on the record about its cause or the resulting incident when reached for comment by IT Brew.
Elizabeth Florer, a Riverside County public information officer, confirmed to IT Brew via email that the county had launched an inquiry into the incident, but said she couldn’t answer specific questions about the individual implicated in the Wired piece due to “county privacy policies.”
“However, we can confirm there was no employee involved in the election process on Election Day in connection with the claims made on social media,” Florer added.
As Wired reported, True the Vote has experienced several setbacks in court. Those include failure to substantiate claims of voter fraud they had submitted to Georgia’s secretary of state, as well as the 2022 arrest of founder Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips for refusing to produce evidence in a defamation lawsuit.